Monday, July 20

Ritual human sacrifices to God: it seems Islamic State resurrects early Islam

The children under the control of ISIS are being trained to carry out the sacrifices -- with appropriate Koranic mutterances, one would assume, to dedicate the act to God. They're not called human sacrifices, at least not in English, but that's what they are.

To my knowledge, Islamic State fighters don't ritually eat any the flesh of those they slaughter during their mass sacrifices. But the following AP report prompts me to take more seriously 2013 warnings from Egyptian television, passed along to Westerners by the Shoebat brothers, about The promotion of human sacrifice and cannibalism in Egypt.

SANLIURFA, Turkey – The children had all been shown videos of beheadings and told by their trainers with the Islamic State group (ISIS) that they would perform one someday. First, they had to practice technique. The more than 120 boys were each given a doll and a sword and told, cut off its head.

A 14-year-old who was among the boys, all abducted from Iraq's Yazidi religious minority, said he couldn't cut it right. He chopped once, twice, three times.

"Then they taught me how to hold the sword, and they told me how to hit. They told me it was the head of the infidels," the boy, renamed Yahya by his ISIS captors, told The Associated Press last week in northern Iraq, where he fled after escaping the ISIS training camp.

When ISIS overran Yazidi towns in northern Iraq last year, they butchered older men and enslaved many of the women and girls. Dozens of young Yazidi boys like Yahya had a different fate: ISIS sought to re-educate them. They forced them to convert to Islam from their ancient faith and tried to turn them into jihadi fighters.

It is part of a concerted effort by the extremists to build a new generation of militants, according to AP interviews with residents who fled or still live under ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The group is recruiting teens and children using gifts, threats and brainwashing.

Boys have been turned into killers and suicide bombers. An ISIS video issued last week showed a boy beheading a Syrian soldier under an adult militant's supervision. Last month, a video showed 25 children unflinchingly shooting 25 captured Syrian soldiers in the head.

In schools and mosques, militants infuse children with extremist doctrine, often turning them against their own parents. Fighters in the street befriend children with toys. ISIS training camps churn out the Ashbal, Arabic for "lion cubs," child fighters for the "caliphate" that ISIS declared across its territory. The caliphate is a historic form of Islamic rule that the group claims to be reviving with its own radical interpretation, though the vast majority of Muslims reject its claims.

"I am terribly worried about future generations," said Abu Hafs Naqshabandi, a Syrian sheikh who runs religion classes for refugees in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa to counter ISIS ideology.

The indoctrination mainly targets Sunni Muslim children. In ISIS-held towns, militants show young people videos at street booths. They hold outdoor events for children, distributing soft drinks and candy -- and propaganda.

They tell adults, "We have given up on you, we care about the new generation," said an anti-ISIS activist who fled the Syrian city of Raqqa, the extremists' de facto capital. He spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve the safety of relatives under ISIS rule.

With the Yazidis, whom IS considers heretics ripe for slaughter, the group sought to take another community's youth, erase their past and replace it with radicalism.

Yahya, his little brother, their mother and hundreds of Yazidis were captured when ISIS seized the Iraqi town of Sulagh in August. They were taken to Raqqa, where the brothers and other Yazidi boys aged 8 to 15 were put in the Farouq training camp. They were given Muslim Arabic names to replace their Kurdish names. Yahya asked that AP not use his real name for his and his family's safety.

He spent nearly five months there, training eight to 10 hours a day, including exercises, weapons drills and Koranic studies. They told him Yazidis are "dirty" and should be killed, he said. They showed him how to shoot someone from close range. The boys hit each other in some exercises. Yahya punched his 10-year-old brother, knocking out a tooth.

The trainer "said if I didn't do it, he'd shoot me," Yahya said. "They ... told us it would make us tougher. They beat us everywhere."

From Middle Eastern Eye, July 17, 2015: "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi reportedly ordered all Islamic State media offices to follow new rules several weeks ago, according to IS source," regarding the release of videos showing beheadings. Moments before and after the beheading can still be shown, but not the actual act. He gave as the excuse for this 'to be considerate of Muslims and children's feelings who may find these scenes grotesque', the IS source was reported as saying."

Given that children controlled by IS are trained to behead people, his excuse rings hollow.

Another explanation would be that there have been so many videos of the beheadings shown online that he realized even non-Arabic people were noticing the ritual aspect of the beheadings in the chanting.

The ritual chanting also accompanied videotaped beheadings done by al Qaeda years ago that were posted online. But there weren't enough of them posted for non-Arabic speaking people to start to put two and two together; i.e., notice that ritual chanting was accompanying the beheading. The ritualistic aspect would imply the person was being sacrificed to the Muslim god.

If I recall correctly, beheadings are done in Saudi Arabia and maybe also other Muslim kingdoms as a form of capital punishment for a crime. But from the chanting in the Islamic State and al Qqaeda videos I don't think the beheadings done by Islamic State are meant as punishment. They aren't actually "executions." They are sacrifices. Part of the duties of observing jihad -- to sacrifice so many people every year to please Allah.

But in that case Islamic State followers are real fundamentalists; they've turned to the practice of 'original' Islam, which eventually sublimated the human sacrifices, as other religions have done.

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